Archive for April, 2004

Yahoo! and privately held Google once again traded blows on Monday, but it appears this time that Yahoo! won the round, thanks in large part to its recently acquired Overture Services unit.

CNN.com, ESPN.com, The Wall Street Journal Online all inked deals with Overture to supply sponsored ads that appear in search results or beside related news stories. CNN.com went even further, agreeing to use Yahoo!’s Web search technology and replace Google.

Nice work, Yahoo!

Molly Holzschlag writes another nice article for www.informit.com, this time about Social Networking.

don’t think anyone could have properly envisioned the social explosion that weblogging would become. Now, technologists and designers are becoming aware that the tools being developed for the weblogger offer real solutions to real web design problems far beyond the vanity plate of a weblog and are in fact part of the social networking phenomenon.

Are we leaving people out that should have easier access to social networks? I think about the comment that Matt Haughey once made about how the community web site Metafilter was purposely made difficult to navigate to keep out the less-technically-inclined. Do we risk controlling communities too tightly? Who makes such determinations?

This very interesting blog post discusses Google’s “killer app”, and it’s not Gmail:

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming….which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else…What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

The world I live in is full of information. I spend my days thinking, reading and talking. There is so much information — it’s ALL information — that handling it and making sense of it become the real challenges.

The projects I take at work, and the questions I choose to think about are generally extremely interconnected. When I’m thinking about XHTML markup, am I not thinking about the internet? How does the realization of something differ from the design of something? Does it? In the world of news web sites, how exactly is the Sports section different from the News section? News related to sports is still news, right?

Anyways, I write all this because I’m starting out with this new blog (thanks for visiting!), and deciding how to categorize it is both an important and a difficult question. Here are the categories I’m going to use initially. I suspect they’ll evolve over time, but this is my best first effort:

• Accessibility
• Back-end + PHP + MySQL
• Blogging
• Browsers
• CSS techniques
• DOM + Scripting
• Design thinking
• Events
• Humor
• Information design
• Knowledge + Content Management
• Life and such
• Mark-up techniques
• Other user agents
• Photos
• Politics + News
• References
• Rules-based design
• Sandbox
• Safe keeping
• Search engines
• Stuff + Things
• The Internet
• Tools + Software
• Travel
• Web standards
• Yahoo!

I must give broad credit to those that came before me. I borrowed categories from D. Keith Robinson at Asterisk, Richard Rutter at clagnut and others. (Lots of the categories come from my blogging experience behind my company’s firewall.

For more information and thinking on categories and taxonomies, check out this article by Lars Marius Garshol: Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all. I’ll probably point to this article again in the future, but it’s relevant to this post, so enjoy!

cheers, nate

Gmail Browser Support

Various articles cover the pending launch of Google’s Gmail email service. I looked at Gmail’s “about” page and was pretty suprised to see:

5. What are Gmail’s system requirements?

Gmail currently supports the following browsers:

• Microsoft IE 5.5 and newer (Windows)
• Netscape 7.1 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
• Mozilla 1.4 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and newer (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)

Regardless of the browser used, you must have JavaScript and cookies enabled. We hope to expand this list of supported browsers in the near future. To get updates on our progress with Gmail, add your email address using the form at the bottom of this page.

No IE 5.0 support? No Safari or Opera support? No IE 5.0 support!?!

How might this change our thoughts and approach?

Please add your thoughts in the comments section below.